| Abstract: |
In many developed countries, abandoned (derelict or underused) industrial
areas often occupy important parts of the cities. This raises issues about the
possibilities of reusing these areas as well as on the conservation of
industrial heritage they often entail. Conjoint Analysis (CA) can shed light
on these issues as it can elicit the preferences of inhabitants for different
scenarios of reuse. So far, only a limited number of applications of CA have
been made on this topic. In this article, we present the results of a CA
experiment on the reuse of a large, mainly abandoned, port area in Trieste
(Italy) featuring buildings with some historical and industrial heritage
value. Three hundred computer assisted interviews have been made on a
representative sample of Trieste inhabitants, eliciting their preferences for
different reuse hypotheses and building conservation scenarios. The survey
explores two original topics: the impact of the time horizon of the payment
(single or decennial special purpose tax) and the consideration of various
mixes of future uses. The collected data have been processed using latent
class and mixed logit models to explore heterogeneity among interviewees'
preferences. Our findings show that, while preferences clearly emerge in favor
of tourism and leisure oriented uses, preferences in terms of conservation and
the impact of cost are much more difficult to measure. This difficulty
persists even when specified or non specified heterogeneity is taken into
account, although Mixed Logit estimate provides more convincing results. |